A Political Circle Jerk and Political Jerks

This is old news to some, but I have found that nothing works in politics. I was listening to the radio and heard about the "Spin Room." It's where politicians and/or their toady lackeys try to put the best "spin" on whatever they have or haven't been up to. I have, of course, heard of the Spin Room before. It's just that after the Monday debate in New Hampshire, in which the current crop of Republican Presidential candidates and their staff tried to pontificate on what had happened just a short while before, I realized that neither the candidates, nor their staff, nor the press interviewing them believed a single word they said.

I don't think that the candidates, their staff, or the press were under any impression that they were actually telling the truth or had some kind of warped sense of reality. I mean if they were all on crack cocaine or large amounts of cheap scotch whiskey it would be one thing. But they weren't, I don't think. So all that is left is to conclude that they were lying through their perfectly polished teeth.

"No kidding," you gasp. Politicians only lie when their lips are moving. Everyone knows that. So why do we put up with it? Is politics about who has the best hair? or who has the whitest teeth? or who has the most money to spend? And before Democrats get on their high horse, it is estimated that Mr Obama will spend somewhere north of $1 billion on his reelection bid.

So why put up with it?

Well we have a situation in this country where party politics is far more important than actually getting anything done. First of all, we have a two-party system. I would like to remind people that it is only one party more than the communists in the former Soviet Union and the current mainland China. Are we seriously trying to say that every political thought or ideology is nested within the Republicrat and Dumbpublican parties? I sometimes say that in America we have a single party with a right-wing and a righter-wing.

Now call me liberal, or call me conservative, but I don't think this is what the Founding Fathers of this nation had in mind when they drafted our "checks and balances" within the framework of the Constitution. In facts our first President, George Washington, said during his farewell address after his second term:

However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

Farewell Address, Sep. 17, 1796

So what's next?